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Summary chapters 1, 2, 3, 9 & 10 for Organizations/Organizations (SOBA111A)
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Summary of chapters 1, 2, 3, 9 & 10 in Organization Theory
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Samenvatting van het boek en de artikelen van Organizations, 2023
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Samenvatting Organization Theory, ISBN: 9780071189620 Organisation Theory (MAN-MOR001)
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Chapter 1 - Introduction: Definitions and ConceptionsTo conceptualize organizations, we don’t use a one-sentence definition but rather a
description by elements, a definition and images.
Organization: Elements, a Definition and Images
Scott’s Elements of Organization
- Social structure: activities, relationships and interactions that take on a regular
pattern → what distinguishes a collective from an organization.
● Informal: emerges spontaneously through daily interactions and relations.
● Formal: designed and formally specified (constructed) in job and task
descriptions and organizational charts.
● Those two are interrelated.
- Participants: humans who “people” the organization.
● Most organizations rely heavily on the human factor of production, but
humans (“participants”) do not automatically exert their labor when they enter
an organization → organizational problem.
- Goals: what the organization is trying to achieve.
● Organizational goals are human goals of owners of the organization, but not
necessarily the goals of other participants, like the workers → possible
conflict of goals.
- Technology: means to transform raw materials of the organization – physical,
informational, or human – into final product.
● Techniques to process resources and materials.
● Shapes many other aspects of the organization, such as the labor process,
social structures, and the organizational environment.
- Environment: all things outside the boundaries of the organizations that are shaped
by or influence a particular organization.
● Organizations exchange with and experience “pressures” from the
environment.
Scott also developed a metatheoretical framework for classifying organizational theories:
- The rational system perspective
● “Organizations are collectivities oriented to the pursuit of relatively specified
goals and exhibiting relatively formalized social structures.”
● Key elements: goals, formal social structure
- The natural system perspective
● “Organizations are collectivities whose participants share common interest in
the survival of the system and who engage in collective activities, informally
structured, to secure this end.”
● Key elements: participants, informal social structure
- The open system perspective
● “Organizations are coalitions of shifting interest groups that develop goals by
negotiations; the structure of the coalitions, its activities, and its outcomes are
strongly influenced by environmental factors.”
● Key elements: environment
,The rational system perspective focuses on maximizing efficiency of the organization and
views humans (the human factor) as objective commodities. In the natural system
perspective human needs begin to be taken into consideration and individual goals are tried
to get aligned with the organizational goals. The open system perspective takes a view on
organizations in and interacting with their environment and states that organizational
strategies and structures are dependent on the certainty/stability of their environment (being
other organizations, customers, suppliers, etc.).
Hall’s Definition of Organization
“An organization is a collectivity with structural elements:
- a relatively identifiable boundary,
- a normative order (rules),
- ranks of authority (hierarchy),
- communications system,
- and membership coordinating systems (procedures);
this collectivity exists on a relatively continuous basis in an environment, and engages in
activities that are usually related to a set of goals;
the activities have outcomes for organizational members, the organization itself, and for
society.”
Morgan’s Images of Organization
The most common metaphors used to conceptualize organizations:
- Machines: technical instruments used to produce some outcome.
● Fits in the rational system perspective.
- Organisms: heavily dependent on the access to and process of resources to stay
alive and flourish.
● Combines features of both the natural- and open system perspective.
- Brains: information-processing, decision-making, learning entities.
● Relies on the ability to access, use and process information.
- Cultural systems: collections of humans who construct reality with shared beliefs,
values, meanings and assumptions.
● Fits in the natural system perspective.
- Political systems: complex network of individuals with conflict and competition for
resources between groups that have different values, interests and priorities.
- Psychic prisons: human-made environments, which limit our freedom of thought and
constrain not just our body but our soul, by their rules and methods.
● Organizational experience can lead to obsessive-compulsive behavioral
tendencies and a general orientation toward discipline and obedience.
- Instruments of domination: instruments that promote the interest of one group at the
expense of another.
● Combines the machine metaphor of the organization as a tool with the
political metaphor’s image of competition and power.
● In this view, organizations do not advance the collective will or the general
interest; they only advance particular interests.
, These metaphors provide an additional framework for sorting organizational theories. It is
however important to recognize that metaphors focus our attention on particular aspects of
organizational life and blinds us to other equally important components.
In this book, the metaphor/framework of the organization as flux and transformation is used.
According to Jaffee, flux and transformation is generated by several fundamental
organizational tensions or contradictions.
Classical Social Theory and Organizational Analysis
Our understanding of organizational structure and process can be enhanced by considering
the work of Karl Marx, Émile Durkheim and Max Weber. These three were living through the
historically monumental transition from feudalism to capitalism, or from an agricultural to an
industrial society.
Marx
Marx believed that an understanding of the human relationships guiding economic
production was the key to social analysis. Marx emphasized the shifting foundation of social
power from the ownership of land to the ownership of capital. Two classes:
- Capitalist class (capital): ownerships of the means of production.
- Working class (labor): selling their labor power for a wage.
Assumption: profitable production requires the control of workers by capitalists. This fits in
Morgan’s metaphor of organization as an instrument of domination. However, this metaphor
obscures another equally important element, which Marx did observe: struggle and
resistance of the workers. The struggle to manage and control the human factor of
production is also one of the central tensions of organizational theory.
Durkheim
For Durkheim, the most general concern was the bases of order and solidarity in society.
These bases shifted along with the transition from agricultural to industrial society:
Mechanical solidarity (Change/transition) Organic solidarity
People doing the same kind of Development of a Based on interdependent divi-
work develop a common set of more complex divi- sion of labor → everyone
beliefs and sentiments that en- sion of labor produces different goods; the
courage consensus and inte- → everyone works a members of society depend
gration while minimizing indivi- different job and indi- upon each other for the
dual differences and social viduals take on a fulfillment of their needs.
conflict. variety of different
economic roles.
Durkheim’s analysis of the transition from agricultural to industrial society has direct
application to one of the most persistent organizational tensions: the difficulty in balancing
the conflicting objectives of differentiation (efficiency) and integration (cohesion).
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